What Is A Black College? Missouri Tweet Reignites PWI vs. HBCU Debate

It all started off innocently enough with a simple minute-long video showing an all-Black group of college students getting turned up to the Nth degree at an amazing party where everybody was dancing as hard as they possibly could. The video was tweeted Thursday night from the Twitter account belonging to Alpha Phi Alpha’s Zeta Alpha Chapter at the University of Missouri (Mizzou) and accompanied by a brief message of encouragement. “‘MAKE MIZZOU GREAT AGAIN,'” the tweet said with an emoji of someone yelling. “Keep this same energy, see y’all next time.” Liked hundreds of times, the tweet from the historically Black fraternity was an obvious play on words to reimagine the president’s divisive motto in a more positive light. But it just took one response to that tweet, in particular, to turn things from what was seemingly meant to be a light-hearted moment of levity to a contentious debate between predominately white institutions (PWIs) and historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Yep, you read right. The retweet from @tygardner__ referred to Mizzou as an HBCU, implying that all it takes is a concentrated group of college students who are Black to transform any campus into a Black college, historical designations be damned. The notion isn’t remotely new, as PWIs and HBCUs don’t have too much in common beyond being institutions of higher learning for mostly young adults. Instead, it’s all about the experience. At an HBCU, culture is everywhere and can many times culminate in the type of experience shown at the Alpha… [Read full story]